The Property of Lies

by Marjorie Eccles

  At Maxstead, they made their way in the direction of the sick bay. Josie was still under Matron’s care, until her possessions could be moved to a new bedroom, which Miss Hillyard had now sensibly ordered, so as to split up the trio of Josie, Avis Myerson and Nancy Waring. He couldn’t question the wisdom of this; if what she believed about them all being concerned in the escapade was correct, separating them would remove any temptation to concoct some sort of subterfuge to explain what had happened to Josie.

  They had almost reached their destination when they encountered Matron, who waved them back, saying Josie was up and about and waiting for them in the music room. ‘She didn’t want to stay in the sick bay. But I’d like a word first, please.’

  Matron, who wore a wedding ring and was otherwise Mrs Benson, though the name was never used, had struck Reardon as a basically warm and kindly woman, but like all nurses she was inclined to be blunt, and she didn’t mince her words in this instance. Josie had had a nasty experience, she went on to say, but she shouldn’t be pampered too much. She had youth on her side and she’d soon recover. ‘It’ll be good for her to talk to you and get it off her chest, but don’t let her forget what she’s done. It won’t help her in the long run. Some of these girls think they can get away with anything.’

  Having delivered the homily, she set off to find Miss Scholes, who had asked to sit in while they talked to Josie.

  Reardon understood what she was saying, but he was prepared to go easy on the girl. It was by no means certain yet that what had happened to her was relevant to their enquiry, but she had been found in the east wing and he was prepared to act as though it was. He’d been afraid that Miss Hillyard was going to insist on being present herself, thus scuppering his chances of getting anything useful from the girl, who he thought would be more than likely to shut up completely in the presence of any of the mistresses. But when Miss Scholes, who was Josie’s form mistress as well as her music teacher, had offered to be there, Miss Hillyard had seemed relieved.

  ‘That’s good. Miss Scholes gets the best out of her,’ she assured Reardon, ‘mainly because Josie likes piano and does her practising, I suspect. She’s only average at her other subjects, though she does at least try – basically she’s sensible and she’s such a nice, lively girl to have in class. Everyone likes Josie.’

  Sensible? If so, then how had she come to be involved in what had at first appeared to be nothing more than a silly escapade, but which had led to such trouble? She hadn’t been in any state when he’d seen her, just after she had been delivered from her night’s ordeal, for him to tell what sort of girl she was.

  The music room was situated at the end of a corridor, its door slightly ajar. As they approached, the opening notes of ‘Für Elise’ being played over and over could be heard, but when they walked in, the music stopped, discordantly. Josie was at the piano in the far corner, her hands resting on the keys – small hands which looked barely able to span an octave. She swung round on the piano stool to face them, already looking slightly defensive.

  Apart from the piano, which was an upright, the room was simply furnished with several music stands, three rows of chairs, and a few shelves where sheet music and songbooks were kept. More shelves held music cases of various kinds and several recorders. A blackboard on an easel stood facing the chairs, with a few bars of music chalked on it. Altogether, it was a bare-looking and functional room, but at least it wasn’t intimidating for Josie, a far better choice than the dark little place the police had to work from, in view of its proximity to that grim building where she had been imprisoned.

  She was still wary of them, and the tremulous smile she summoned now was shy, but she seemed to have a natural appeal about her; a smallish girl with a still childish figure and thick, wavy dark hair, a lively face. The colour had returned to her cheeks since yesterday, he was relieved to see. As Matron had said, she was young and, he thought, would normally be of a happy-go-lucky nature, though that wasn’t apparent today. After the small smile her features settled back into misery.

  Pickersgill began to pull chairs together as Miss Scholes arrived in a flutter of apologies, though she’d been only just behind them. The DC beckoned Josie from the piano stool to join them and Reardon gave him points for that. The four of them in an informal group was a far better alternative than sitting as inquisitors facing Josie.

  Miss Scholes, however, touched her gently on the shoulder, gave her an encouraging smile as if to say she was there, but only if needed, and then placed herself at the far end of the first row of chairs, as though trying to make herself invisible. She was a faded blonde with a faraway look in her eyes and a soft voice that was scarcely above a whisper, an indecisive woman who blushed easily and left her sentences unfinished. Despite the warm day, she was wearing a long droopy cardigan over a brown dress, and a diamond ring on her engagement finger from the fiancé who would never return.

  Josie perched on the edge of her chair, her head drooping as if waiting execution.

  ‘So what have you decided to tell us about why you went into the east wing at night, Josie?’ Reardon asked, going along with a fiction no one could believe in for one moment – her convenient loss of memory. She hadn’t been knocked down, hit on the head or concussed, though she’d certainly been manhandled, and there were bruises to prove it. The unwillingness to admit to anything at all was far more likely due to a refusal, or perhaps a fear, of saying too much. Altogether, she’d spent a wretched night that couldn’t have been wished on anyone, much less a young girl like her, and that hadn’t come about through anything but a deliberate act on someone’s part. Reardon now thought he had a good idea of what might have happened, and possibly why, but he hadn’t yet worked out the who part of it. ‘Don’t be alarmed, Josie,’ he reassured her. ‘I promise you won’t be in any trouble over anything you have to tell us.’

  The music room overlooked the tennis court, and Josie was avoiding looking at him or Pickersgill by staring out of the window, watching the two girls on the tennis court, following the ball with her eyes. It was stuffy in the room, although the windows had been thrown open to what promised to be yet another hot day, and the thunk of ball on racquet, the exasperated shouts from one girl as the other continually muffed a shot came clearly into the silence.

  It wasn’t going to be easy to get her to talk and he wondered what, or who, she was afraid of. At the same time he thought she looked as though she was normally a girl with plenty of spirit and might conceivably have been provoked into accepting a challenge, so he took a chance on that. ‘They say the east wing is haunted, don’t they? Did you go there for a dare?’

  She looked wary for a moment, but then she answered rather too quickly, grasping at an excuse that probably hadn’t occurred to her before, ‘I might have done.’

  ‘But it wasn’t a ghost who shut you up in that room, Josie.’

  She caught her breath, but said nothing. Like Antonia, she evidently had a streak of stubbornness. All the same, she’d been reminded of the person who had shut her up, and she lost colour. ‘I don’t know if anyone did shut me in. Maybe the door was just stuck,’ she said, rather desperately now.

  Miss Hillyard had said she was a truthful girl and most likely she was, in normal circumstances. But she would have to learn to lie better than that if she wanted to be believed. ‘You know that won’t do, Josie,’ he told her gently. ‘There was a lump of old wood wedged under that door to stop you opening it.’ She looked down at her hands, taking pinches of the skirt of her print dress and pleating it into folds. ‘How did Antonia know where you’d be?’

  ‘I don’t know. I – I suppose she just guessed.’

  ‘That’s possible, I suppose. But not just out of the blue. What could have led her to guess?’

  She shrugged slightly. ‘How should I know?’

  If she went on like this she would exhaust his patience, however much he was disposed to like her. ‘That wing has been placed out of bounds because it’s dangerous, yo
u know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Not if you know where to go.’

  ‘So you’ve been in there before?’ He’d tripped her up and she bit her lip. ‘Look, Josie, we know you have. We’ve found things in there.’ He paused. ‘Cigarette packets, candles. Empty bottles.’

  He didn’t say that this had in fact not yet been mentioned to Miss Hillyard, but the way her face blanched, he guessed that was probably the terrifying prospect that had occurred to her.

  The door of the room where she’d been forced to spend the night hadn’t been locked (any keys to these doors had almost certainly been lost years ago), nor had it stuck accidentally. It had been jammed tightly shut with the aid of that bit of wood driven in at floor level. It was one of the few rooms with windows, and even its shutters were still intact, and they had been closed, making the room totally dark. When they found her, her voice almost gone with shouting for help, Josie had wedged herself into a corner and fallen, utterly spent, into an exhausted sleep that was more like torpor, from which she was only faintly roused when the door was at last opened, as if she had lost hope of ever being rescued. As well the poor child might, Reardon reflected, after spending all night in that bare, foul-smelling black hole.

  In the initial, somewhat cursory search of the rabbit warren that was the east wing, after the discovery of Isabelle Blanchard’s body, most of the rooms and hidden places had been revealed as empty of anything except rodent droppings and the rotting corpses or skeletons of birds which had fallen down chimneys. Those bottles, the cigarette ends and other rubbish found in one room had been discounted, put down to the builders, who’d most likely taken their lunch in there sometimes, out of the rain. But in the search for Josie, it had been given more attention.

  Not much stretch of the imagination was needed to surmise pretty well what had been going on. The empty bottles into which candles had been stuck were sherry bottles, hardly builders’ tipple, and the cigarettes were black Russian Sobranie with gold tips. The remains of a would-be sophisticated version of a midnight dormitory feast, only spoilt by the quantity of decidedly unsophisticated sweet wrappers and biscuit packets scattered around. Josie had been wearing her pyjamas underneath her raincoat when she was rescued, and she had been crouched on the floor in an exhausted doze, resting her head on her shoe bag. A very inadequate pillow, it must have been, but handy as a receptacle for the rubbish which had clearly been thought incriminating enough for her to venture out at night to remove. But that didn’t provide any answers as to why she’d been shut up in there, and why she was refusing to say who the person was who had done it, when clearly she did know.

  She still wasn’t looking at either of them. She’d pivoted round on the piano stool again, half facing them, but still keeping her eyes fixed steadfastly on the game going on in the court.

  ‘I think you’re shielding someone, Josie,’ Reardon said at last.

  She swung round from the window. She seemed to draw herself inwards, head down, and Miss Scholes made a hesitant, protective move towards her. ‘I’ve told you! I can’t remember, I can’t!’ she whispered.

  ‘That’s not quite true, is it?’

  He was quite unprepared for the terror in her eyes as she at last raised her head and looked towards him. She was being driven into a corner, but since he wasn’t accustomed to bullying little girls – and that was all she was, a frightened little girl, though frightened of what? – it was enough to make him feel he’d gone far enough.

  ‘All right, Josie, we’ll leave it for now. But think about this. It doesn’t look as though whoever put you in that room and left you alone all night had any good intentions towards you, so why are you protecting them? If it could happen to you, it could happen to someone else.’

  She turned away and gave a choked little sound. For a moment, he thought he had her, but she kept her head averted, ashamed of her tears, and repeated stubbornly, ‘I didn’t see who it was.’

  He stood up. ‘We have to go now, but we’re going to be around here for a while, so if you change your mind …’

  ‘I won’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t, I really can’t.’

  He met the teacher’s look over Josie’s shoulder, a look that said: ‘Leave this to me. Trust me.’ And somehow he knew he could do that, though Miss Scholes was not someone you immediately felt would be capable of giving support. From what he had heard about her past, she was a woman unable to put her sadness aside and step into the future, a shy woman who still cried for her lost lover. And yet, it appeared she cared enough for the girls in her charge to put her diffidence aside and come forward and help them.

  ‘Thank you, Josie, Miss Scholes, we’ll leave you now. Take care.’

  The look Josie gave him was astonished, relieved, apprehensive, all three. Unable to believe she was going to be left alone.

  ‘Phew! And there’s still those other girls to see,’ Pickersgill said, as they passed the now empty tennis court. ‘If they’re all as stubborn as she is …’

  It wasn’t something Reardon faced with any prospect of pleasure. Ellen had reminded him of the possibility of angry parents descending on Maxstead like an avalanche. The last half-hour with Josie and the prospect of more girls to see didn’t make him feel any better.

  They had hardly walked more than a few yards when he felt a touch on his arm and turned to see Miss Scholes, who had followed them. She said hesitantly, ‘If you can spare a moment I … I’d like to thank you for having so much patience with Josie.’

  ‘I’m not sure about that. I was afraid it might give out, I have to confess,’ he said drily. ‘I think it’s you who should be thanked for being with her. I could see she appreciated it.’

  ‘Oh, goodness, that was nothing! I wanted to be with her because well, Josie’s not foolish, and I’m sure she will … Just give her time. She’s very upset just now.’

  He forbore to say that time was something they didn’t have to spare. ‘I’m sorry to have upset her. I didn’t enjoy pressing her like that, Miss Scholes.’

  ‘No, no, of course not, I know that.’ She still stood there, uncertainly.

  ‘Was there something else you wanted?’

  ‘What? Oh, yes.’ She drew her droopy cardigan tighter round her thin shoulders. ‘It’s nothing, really, but that night I went outside for a minute or so – I don’t sleep very well, you see, and I wanted some fresh air. Such a hot night …’ She finished in a rush, ‘I might have seen … I think I saw someone moving from the direction of the east wing.’

  ‘You did? Who was it, Miss Scholes?’

  ‘No one I recognized.’

  ‘A man or a woman?’

  ‘I couldn’t see that. It might have been a man, but it was dark and I, I wasn’t sure at first whether I’d just imagined it, whether it wasn’t just another shadow. In fact, I’m not sure even now, but in view of what’s happened—’

  ‘Where did you say this was?’

  ‘Oh, in the garden at the side of the house that runs from the Quad.’

  ‘Which direction was this person going?’

  ‘You know, I really couldn’t tell. I only saw it for a moment. Merely a fleeting impression of movement that stopped. That’s why I haven’t mentioned it before, but now …’

  ‘Could it have been Heaviside?’ The old gardener was the only man who could legitimately have been wandering around the school grounds. But in the dark?

  ‘Heaviside? Oh, no! Goodness, no! Oh, look, I’ve told you, I don’t even know if it was a person at all.’ Her initial confidence was rapidly dissipating. She was regretting the impulse that had driven her to follow them. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have spoken. I’m sure now I was mistaken, that it was just a shadow I saw. I must get back to Josie.’

  Clearly, he wasn’t going to get much further by pressing her, rather the reverse. ‘All right, Miss Scholes, but thank you for letting us know.’

  He watched her as she scurried back in the direction of the music room. What she’d seen, or not seen, was
vague but unsettling, because there just might be something in it. But you had to admire the woman. She might have regretted the impulse which had made her speak, but she had been sure enough at first about what she’d seen to give her the nerve to come forward with it.

  ELEVEN

  After talking to Vic Wetherby, Gilmore and Gargrave had gone straight from Little Sidding to the street he had mentioned. Situated on the edge of Arms Green, Folbury’s least salubrious neighbourhood, it was in a desolate area, much of which was scheduled for clearance and rebuilding by the council. It was the nearest to a slum area that Folbury came. Corner shops, home workshops and sheds, a betting shop with grimy windows. A fish and chip shop, midday fumes still lingering. Children too young for the brick-built elementary school further along playing in the dirty streets which, if they hadn’t been scheduled for demolition, ought to be. Gilmour thought of the gardens and playing fields surrounding Maxstead Court School, and the green fields and country lanes where Vic Wetherby lived.

  Some clearance had reached as far as most of Melia Street, but the rebuilding hadn’t happened yet – nor did there seem to be any likelihood, in view of the present economic slump, that it would happen in the foreseeable future. The only buildings left in this unlovely spot comprised what had once been a Methodist chapel with ‘Ebenezer’ incised in stone above its lintel, standing alone and desolate with a derelict warehouse further along – and the tail end of what had once been a longer terrace of small homes. Wetherby’s cryptic remark about a house number not being important was explained. There were only three left, the sole indication that life might still exist in these few hundred square yards. They were not pretty, nor was their appeal enhanced by the pop-bottling factory stretching out somewhere behind, its conglomeration of low buildings crouching threateningly, and its chimneys contributing more layers of dirt to the already grimy red brick of the houses.